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Poster: binderc Date: Apr 20, 2009 2:04pm
Forum: etree Subject: attach images to your tapings!

Hi there,

We want to encourage all of you to attach any image files you may have to the live shows you upload. A good photo of a band playing can really enhance an item; although the recordings are certainly the most important part, it's always fun to see the band playing.

Here are some examples of items that are rounded out with interesting images:

A Trampled by Turtles show with images from the show attached: http://www.archive.org/details/tbt2009-01-28.at4041.flac16

A Mountain Goats show with a photo of John Darnielle attached: http://www.archive.org/details/tmg2009-04-02.ca11

A Yonder Mountain String Band show with a photo of the ticket stub attached: http://www.archive.org/details/ymsb2008-10-18.flac16.aud

A John Mayer show with a photo of the cover of the CD which was made from the show: http://www.archive.org/details/jmayer2008-08-25.tapergeek.flac

Please add photos you may have to update your shows and make the Live Music Archive that much more exciting :)

Thanks for all you do to contribute to archive.org!

Best,
Cara

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Poster: xtifr Date: Apr 20, 2009 2:15pm
Forum: etree Subject: Re: attach images to your tapings!

Keep in mind: if you just dump in a bunch of random large images, the archive will choose the first one (alphabetically), and send the entire image to everyone who browses the details page for that show, along with instructions to your browser to scale it down to a thumbnail (which makes the download of the entire image extremely pointless).

The alphabetical part can be a problem because "back" sorts before "front", so if you include a front cover and back cover, the back cover is, more often than not, what gets displayed. Usually not what you want. Example here: http://www.archive.org/details/rad1990-02-24.shnf

The send-the-whole-file part is a major problem for people who may be browsing the archive with mobile devices and pay by the kilobyte. Just looking at the details page of http://www.archive.org/details/tbt2009-01-28.at4041.flac16 (for example) will result in the download of a nearly six megabytes, all just to provide a little 160 pixel-wide thumbnail! This is extremely wasteful and expensive to the poor folks who just want to review the available shows for later downloading!

I agree that pictures are nice, but it would be even nicer if the Archive maintainers could improve their software to be a little more friendly before calling for a general upload of images. Making a local, pre-scaled thumbnail when generating derivatives would be a bare minimum, IMO!

And for those who would like to upload images, but don't want to punish people who innocently browse the archive with their phones or whatnot, consider doing something like I did with this show: http://www.archive.org/details/rad1984-03-03.shnf -- I made a pre-scaled thumbnail image (only 19k) and named it "archive_image.jpg" so it would sort alphabetically before the cover images.

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Poster: morst Date: Apr 29, 2009 10:55pm
Forum: etree Subject: Re: attach images to your tapings!

I just rename the image I want to have featured starting with "A1-" and that makes it alphabetize to the top. I try not to make 'em too huge, but if the archive would automatically derive a thumbnail, that would be a nice touch. My favorite images to use are usually posters, handbills, tickets, photos of the venues' marquee, or on-stage pictures, though sometimes I do something different, like an animated gif.

ps - note that upper and lower case are handled separately by the archive.org servers.